The Department of the Interior plans to “imminently” fire at least 2,000 employees across the agency, including hundreds of people working at the National Park Service, the agency revealed in a Monday legal filing.
The department is prepared to lay off at least 189 people across the Park Service’s Northeast, Southwest, and Pacific West regional offices alone, according to the filing. Those regional offices oversee dozens of iconic parks including Yosemite National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, Acadia National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The NPS office that oversees the Chesapeake Bay recovery efforts would lose six of its 10 employees under the Interior Department’s proposed plans.
The department is also planning to fire more than 10% of the Utah office of the Bureau of Land Management, which is primarily responsible for managing mineral permits and oil and gas leasing across the state’s significant federal lands. And a preeminent environmental research center in Columbia, Missouri, that investigates how pollution, contaminants like PFAS and invasive species affect fish habitats, wastewater treatment and ecosystems is set to lose about 80% of its total employees.
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The filing, submitted to the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, offers the most detailed picture yet of how the administration is planning to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce.
That said, the planned RIFs laid out in the legal filing represent only some of the Interior Department’s proposed “reductions-in-force”; it lists the proposed cuts in areas that are represented by five employee unions that are suing the Trump administration.
The administration is currently fighting in court to carry out RIFs during the government shutdown.
Federal Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order last week, halting the administration’s ability to fire workers represented by the federal employee unions suing the administration over its plans.
It’s possible that the Interior Department is planning on laying off many more employees in areas that are not represented by unions. The park system has already lost about one-quarter of its full-time staff over the last year, according to estimates from the National Parks Conservation Association.
The administration has already issued layoff notices to more than 3,000 workers across the federal government since the shutdown began. Further firing notifications have largely been put on hold since Illston issued the temporary restraining order last week.
Both Idaho Senators told NOTUS that they know little about the layoffs. Idaho is slated to lose 48 employees from its BLM office, which manages about one-quarter of the state’s lands for mining, timber, rangelands and other purposes. The NPS Pacific West regional office, which is set to lose 57 workers, also oversees Idaho NPS lands.
When asked whether the layoffs concerned him, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo said, “It’s always a concern. When we’ve got a government shutdown like this, we should try to get it ended.”
The Trump administration has blamed the shutdown for the RIFs broadly in an effort to pressure Democrats to reopen the government. But the Interior Department is insisting in its legal filings that these mass layoffs have nothing to do with the shutdown and have been in the works for months.
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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